Yandex Connectivity Falls After Drone Strikes Target Three Facilities

Yandex’s network connectivity fell sharply after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted three company facilities in Russia, disrupting infrastructure used for computing and online services.

Network traffic initially dropped to about 57% of its peak after the Sasovo facility was struck. The site housed two supercomputers. A separate attack knocked the much larger Kaluga data center offline, while another strike targeted Yandex’s Vladimir facility on Oct. 11.

Bot traffic originating from Yandex’s network also declined. The change may partly reflect reduced activity by Yandex’s web crawlers.

Maksut Shadayev, Russia’s digital development minister, described the attacks as “unprecedented” and said he had discussed data-center security with the Defense Ministry. Backup systems and computing capacity at other locations helped keep Yandex’s operations running, he said.

Repairing damaged server equipment could take up to six months.